Book Description

This is a book about friendship. Olivier is a young accountant in Atlanta. He investigates the mysterious disappearance of several documents and a series of frauds. His life seems to be all written before him until he meets a fascinating new set of friends.

High school class discussions of a broad range of topics are included: bribery, parental relationships, cooking, gambling and purchasing property.

Sample Chapter

Hot Money

June 2012

As usual in any business, sometimes you don’t have enough to do, and
then suddenly there is too much work. For one, Olivier had been too
eager to accept invitations to give a few talks. He discovered that he
had overbooked himself for June, when a huge case of potential
embezzlement fell in his lap. It was the unpleasant case of a car
dealer. According to Olivier, the manager himself, Patrick Wilson, was
robbing the company of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Olivier was
still working on the McCann-Mitty case.

Mitty had handled the accounts of about 20 small companies. His
disappearance, along with his files, was bad news for a lot of good
people. The first thing Olivier had noticed was that Eve McCann’s
company was filed under the business name “Classic Books,” but there
was also a corporation in Athens, Georgia, managed by a certain David
Matty from Toronto, called Classic and Books. What about that! It was
too much of a coincidence. The FBI got interested and was checking the
other accounts. It turned out that four companies that Danny Mitty was
in charge of had a double somewhere with almost the same name and the
exact same income statement and balance sheet as the real company. At
first glance, it would look like somebody made a typo in the name of the
company. Behind the basic numbers, however, everything was different.
Expenses were justified by invoices of fake companies and were paid by
checks signed by none other than David Matty. He was laundering money
through a vast number of fake companies and individuals. Ultimately, the
money found its way into an IBC, an international business corporation
in the Seychelles, near Madagascar.

The Canadian police found that Mr. David Matty from Toronto was unknown
to them. David Matty’s bank accounts in Athens had been closed two
days after Danny had disappeared from Atlanta. Whatever his real name
was, nobody could even figure out how much Danny Mitty or David Matty
had accumulated, where he had worked, not even for whom. Probably a drug
lord, maybe a terrorist. It was not on the scale of Enron, but it was
irritating enough.

The case was dragging on. Norman and Olivier were both frustrated. Where
was that man? His car had been found downtown in a parking lot. No
fingerprints were in the car. As a matter of fact, no fingerprints were
found anywhere. He was somewhere, under a new name, spending money that
might never be recovered.

However, it’s difficult to leave without a trace nowadays. There was a
photograph of him on his driver’s license. The FBI found that he had
left fingerprints when he had applied for a concealed weapons permit
under the name of Danny Mitty. Agent Wheeler, rather talkative for an
FBI Agent, let Norman know that the Mitty-of-the-fingerprints had never
been arrested, so they still were not sure who he was. The FBI was
trying their face recognition software to find his trace at the Atlanta
airport. It was a major hassle, as the Airport handles tens of thousands
of passengers every day and the driver’s license photo was not of the
best quality. So far, his face had not been matched with any of the
passengers to Toronto. Agent Wheeler was less worried about finding
Danny Mitty than about finding his boss, the mystery man behind this,
and understanding what the money was for. These days, one worried even
more about terrorism than about drug cartels. After that, the FBI agent
clammed up, leaving the lawyer very frustrated. Obviously, passengers to
the Seychelles would be next on the FBI list, but no news came in.

Norman said, “I bet his real name is somewhere in his files.”

“He was really certified as Mitty, I checked that, he graduated from
Keller, here in Atlanta. He first worked for a firm in Duluth, they had
nothing good or bad to say about him, just yes, he had worked there. He
could have changed his name before he went to school, and he would have
had to do it if he was a felon, but his fingerprints are not on file, so
why do it?”

“There are lots of reasons why people want to change their name, one
of the main ones is to escape a spouse or to avoid paying for child
support. But I bet you can find him, you know.”

Olivier answered, “The FBI is much better equipped than I am.
They’ll find him. They will send his fingerprints to Interpol, check
his medical records, check his medications, and see if he keeps
subscribing to his favorite magazines, they’ll find him. It’s much
more difficult to disappear than before 9/11.”

“If you ever get any idea, please let me know.”

They did not want the man to get away with it, and that cemented their
friendship. Olivier referred clients to Norman for tax advice and Norman
used Olivier as an auditor for his clients. In any other respect, they
were very different. Norman Cuffin was an in-your-face type of guy and
he looked like it. Small and compactly built, assertive, he usually
impressed the jury. Olivier was lanky, laid-back, always smiling, never
showing tension, and most people underestimated him. They made quite a
pair.

Norman had become an assiduous visitor at the house. He was obviously
attracted to Dahlia-Rose and Olivier tried to fight the feeling that he
was annoyed by it.

Patrick Wilson, the manager of Bypass Auto, was in deep trouble. He
stood accused of bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, making
multiple false statements and aggravated identity theft. It was the
second case where Olivier was involved with the local FBI. There were
two things he did not understand at all. First. How come the preceding
auditor had not seen anything wrong? Why hadn’t he checked for
duplicate entries? Wilson had a loan and a line of credit amounting to
over 2 million dollars. He’d spent the money on a high-end lifestyle
and made false statements to the bank. Second. How did Wilson convince
himself that it would last? This was not a case of a small swindler who
gets in deep and deeper trouble. It was a man who had never even
considered reimbursing the bank. He cheated on the inventory, passed off
cars he had on consignment as his own, falsified information on his loan
applications, inflated the number of cars sold, and practiced the most
rudimentary check kiting.

Olivier explained his frustration to Dahlia-Rose. She asked what kiting
was. “Kiting is taking advantage of the delay between the time you
deposit a check and the time it is processed. It is also called the
float.”

“I didn’t know that it was illegal.”

“It is illegal when the way you use it is equivalent to getting a loan
that the bank would not give to you. Well, roughly, that’s what it is:
using the float as a system to defraud the bank.”

“OK, so why are you frustrated?”

“Because Wilson stole about two million dollars and he did not think!
He had no plan, he just improvised ways to get away with it that were
going to last a few months at most, - he was lucky, it lasted almost two
years - and I don’t understand it. Plus, he had the guts to ask me if
I could help him! I just don’t understand what he wanted to do!”

“I know the answer to that question. You don’t understand Wilson
because you always know things in advance. You know what we’re going
to eat for the whole week, and how much we are going to spend this month
on food. Most people know just what they are going to eat today. You
know that next year you are going to buy a cistern and a pump for
rainwater, and you told me to try to establish a budget for groundcover
in the front yard. Most people do not think a year or two in advance,
they think at most a few weeks in advance. I guess crooks are no
different. Some crooks think a year in advance, many think only a day or
two in advance.”

“You’re right, it is all about the capacity to anticipate. People
develop it or they don’t, I suppose. Being a crook has nothing to do
with it.”

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Author Profile

Claude Lambert

I once promised that if I came out of poor health, I would write a book to make people smile: ON PETS AND MEN. VAGUE SOUVENIR is about a French-American couple forming during WWii. CRIMES OF THE BALANCE SHEET is about friendship. I had three lives, one in Belgium where I was born and became a Pastor and Civil Rights activist (1940-1971), one in France as a scientist (1971-1998) and one in the United States as a happy mom re-united with her children and sweetly retired. I also published in French a novel, 50 short stories for children and a political book illustrated by Virginia Leirens (a companion of Chagall).